THE Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, drew on his fluency in Mandarin
and his past as a diplomat in Beijing to launch his charm offensive
in a meeting with the President of China, Hu Jintao, in Sydney
yesterday.

Mr Rudd and Mr Hu conducted the 30-minute meeting in Mandarin,
avoiding the need for interpreters, which can introduce a
stop-start tenor to international meetings.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, was
unimpressed. He accused the Opposition Leader of being a show-off
and pointed out that he too was a former diplomat with a foreign
language - French.

Mr Rudd told reporters he had started by making light-hearted
conversation with Mr Hu in Mandarin and then the two men had
continued their dialogue in that language.

"When I've been to Beijing before, sometimes conversations are
in Chinese, sometimes in English," he said.

"President Hu seemed quite desirous in continuing the
conversation in Chinese and I was pretty relaxed about that. It's a
matter of the way in which the Chinese wish to conduct these
conversations so, yes, we conducted our conversation in
Chinese."

The meeting covered the economic relationship between Australia
and China, including Beijing's interest in longer-term co-operation
on energy supply and Labor's interest in creating more
opportunities for Australian banks and financial service companies
to operate in China.

"I was also able to reflect with the President that, when he
came here for the first time in the 1980s, he was working then in
the Chinese Communist Youth League and part of my job at the
embassy in Beijing in 1986 was to prepare for his visit to
Australia then, and I vaguely remember working on the details of
that particular visit."

Asked on ABC radio whether the Government had been upstaged by
the Labor leader in its dealings with the visiting Chinese
President, Mr Downer said: "Well, remember I'm the Foreign Minister
so I work every day with people who can speak foreign languages and
I can speak French."

Presenter: "Do you?"

Mr Downer: "I speak French. That's not seen in diplomacy as a
great party trick - to be able to speak a foreign language."

Mr Downer and the ABC presenter Jon Faine then conversed on-air
in French before the Foreign Minister resumed in English.

"I mean I don't think in diplomacy the fact that you can speak
foreign languages is anything special, and obviously he runs the
risk of being seen by a lot of Australians as a show-off."

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